Donnerstag Mrz 20, 2008

The past

Last year November Martin Adamek and me
started to work on a full-featured set of modules to support the
Groovy programming language and the grails application server. After being quite
impressed (and a little bit depressed) about the feature-set of the
Intellij Groovy/Grails plug-in, we wanted to create something similar for NetBeans.

One key responsibility of all
OpenSource projects is to carefully look around what's already out in
the world. Re-use of existing sourcecode and/or leveraging existing libraries is a given in this
culture. Therefore we started off our work by using the existing, but
inactive coyote plug-in. Doing a language plug-in. with an extensive feature-set
comparable to the Intellij plug-in. goes way beyond the scope of the
otherwise very helpful Schliemann framework.

This left us with the cumbersome tasks
of coding everything from scratch against the NetBeans Editor API. Luckily we
soon discovered Tor Norby's GSF Framework. GSF's purpose is to help creating
exactly what we were about to create - A new scripting language support
module. GSF really achieves this goal and has been one of the reasons, why we are able to develop so many
features in such a short period of time.

Customizing of Grails Environment and
Serverport. Auto-deploy to Glassfish Appserver:

Starting common grails-tasks from
context menu:

Status of running grails server
displayed in status-line:

Syntax Highlighting:

Participation

I would love to get feedback about this
project. No matter how much planning one is doing, at the end of the day the software
should be used and should be usable for real live users. Therefore I'm bleeding to get your
feedback. What you like, what you don't like, what you think we should implement. Ideally, you
file your bugs and wishes right where they will end-up anyway and that's the NetBeans
issue-tracking system Issuezilla.

The future

There are still many, many things
missing from the modules. Depending on the interest, people are showing for the initial release (
we won't make it into NetBeans 6.1 ), these are candidatesfor features of the next release:

Debugging support. (yes - it's sad
but true, that we have no debugging support at the moment)